Vikram Zutshi at the Asian Review of Books:
The word yakuza has its own history, and it is not what most readers assume. Kabuki theatre and popular fiction gave the word its start, with a stock character called a yakuza-mono: an outlaw or drifter who lived off the gambling tables. The literal meaning is close to “a useless one” or “a bad one”, and the irony is that gamblers adopted it themselves, a self-mocking title for men who made their living by wits and risk while calling themselves worthless. The word stayed slang for a gambler until the early 1900s, when it hardened into a straightforward synonym for gangster. American journalists covering postwar Japan finished the job. They capitalised it into “the Yakuza” the way they capitalised “the Mafia”, and the word spread around the world. The gangsters have spent the century since fighting a label they never chose for a life they mostly did.
That self-mocking title outlasted the men who coined it, and so did the culture that grew up around them. My own interest in that culture began with tattoos.
More here.
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